This yearâs June Board Weekend tackles a finite planet with infinite potential
'Imagination' panelists Charles Elachi (right) and Ariane Koek with moderator and SGS senior program advisor Edward MortimerâThe greatest risk to man is not that he aims too high and misses, but that he aims too low and hitsâ â Michelangelo âImagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky... Imagine all the people sharing all the worldâ â John Lennon They were written centuries apart, but the two quotes were stated repeatedly as board members, guests, donors and speakers gathered at Schloss Leopoldskron for Salzburg Global Seminarâs Annual June Board Weekend. Many governments, businesses and regular citizens alike are thankfully realizing that the world only has a finite amount of resources â but that is not to say that humanityâs possibilities are finite also. As demonstrated by many of the weekendâs speakers, humanity can achieve a lot if people are willing and able to express and explore their imagination. For some, even the sky poses no limit. But to ensure that our planet and prosperity is viable for future generations, we must find sustainable solutions to the challenges we face. And to ensure that prosperity for all, and not just the wealthy, those imaginative, sustainable solutions must also be fair and just. Salzburg Global Seminar, founded in 1947 under the auspices of uniting young minds across war-torn Europe and America, has just emerged from a period of strategic review as it seeks to secure its future in an ever-changing century; this weekend was the showcase of this new vision. Under its new strategy, Salzburg Globalâs future programs will sit within three âclustersâ: imagination, sustainability and justice. With the Imagine-inspired title âAbove Us Only Sky: Finite Planet, Infinite Potentialâ, the speakers at three-day event examined these three clusters interconnect to drive progress, tackle our fragile future and unlock humanityâs potential.
A Fragile World Opening the session on the Friday night â fresh from her third trip in seven months to the tinder-box of the Middle East â Kristalina Georgieva, the European Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, shared her concerns of âa more fragile worldâ. In her keynote speech âRicher Yet More Fragile â How Can We Learn To Live In A More Volatile World?â Georgieva explained that despite all the progress mankind has made in recent centuries and decades, our world still faces a precarious future, in many regions of the world and for many reasons. âSyria is a crisis like no other. In its scale. In its ferocity. In its sheer savagery. Syria is the crisis I lose sleep over,â she said. âLet's face it: in Syria we have seen the total, absolute, unmitigated failure of diplomacy. Syria itself is now beyond fragility â but the wider region is becoming extremely fragile⌠We can avoid reality but we cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.â But conflict within and between countries is not the only reason we face a more fragile world, the Commissioner explained. Chad, for example, is being âbuffeted by more than one crisis at onceâ, from repeated food crises due to environmental factors, to regional instability stemming from conflicts in neighboring Mali, the Darfur region of Sudan and the anarchic Central African Republic. âWhat you have now in Chad is a situation of chronic crisis. Chronic fragility. Not occasional one-off disasters â but a creeping, on-going state of crisis, in which people are only getting by thanks to international assistance,â said Georgieva. But, as Georgieva explained, it is not only developing nations that are facing this fragility â as the impact of the 2011 âtriple disasterâ of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown on Japan, the worldâs fourth largest economy, and that of Hurricane Sandy on the worldâs richest country, the USA, starkly demonstrated. Between 1998 and 2009, 100,000 people died in Europe alone owing to extreme weather. Flooding has proven the most economically costly to the continent, but summer heat waves have claimed the most lives. More worryingly, these different crises are impacting each other â the diversion of resources from one crisis to another means we cannot handle all the disasters and conflicts faced in different parts of the world. âThese are not random events. They are part of a wider trend,â warned Georgieva. The frequency of disasters is going up, she told the gathered board members and invited local guests. Natural disasters have increases five-fold since 1975, with an estimated 80 percent of these caused by extreme weather linked to climate change; the economic losses are growing too. Despite rising fragility, population is booming, but this growth will mostly serve to exacerbate the problem. âIs the global governance system fit for purpose? ... Is the international system fit to deal with these acute issues of fragility?â Georgieva asked the audience. According to the Commissioner, the key to meeting this challenge of increasing fragility is resilienceâand leadership. Countries must be made resilient to the challenges they face, which requires investment in long-term development not just short-sighted aid. Optimistically, Georgieva said the notion that we can continue the way we have been is not one subscribed to by the younger generation, making her hopeful for improved leadership in working towards resilience. Concluding, the Commissioner said, âAt the end of the day, it is all about leadership. âIn the context of fragility, that means leadership which is not purely reactive â but addresses issues before they blow up. "On Syria, no one will ever know if the current tragedy could have been prevented with more proactive leadership. "On climate change and population growth, I know that if we do not see more assertive leadership, we will all be in very big trouble. âThis seems a fitting conclusion for a Salzburg seminar speech, because Salzburg is really about transformative leadership. And I am sure this board meeting will make its contribution to empowering the next generation of transformative leaders.â As is reflected in the three clusters of its program, Salzburg Global Seminar believes that this transformative leadership will need to be found in imaginative, sustainable and just thinking, and the three panels that followed Georgievaâs speech on the Saturday explored these themes.
Imagination Salzburg Global has had a long-running arts and culture program; whilst these will be incorporated in the âImaginationâ cluster, as Charles Elachi, director of NASAâs Jet Propulsion Laboratory indicated through his explanation of the innovation and ingenuity needed to land the Curiosity rover on Mars, imagination is vital to much more than just the arts. The drive and determination to understand the making and meaning of the universe have pushed forward NASAâs work despite the political and financial gridlock in Washington, and the Curiosity rover serves as proof of what can be achieved if we harness that drive, said Elachi. By gaining a greater understanding of our nearest planetary neighbor, especially in relation to its geology and current lack of water, we can better enhance our understanding of our own planet, he explained. Given both its funding situation and the sheer research and development needed to launch such vast projects, NASA not only needs imaginative, but also long-term thinking to sustain its program; the agency is already making plans for 2030. After showing the audience a short film detailing the tense âseven minutes of terrorâ endured by the engineers as they attempted to land the rover on Mars, Elachi quoted US President Theodore Roosevelt: âFar better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure ...than to rank with those poor spirits... in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.â âImagination is the best gift that we have,â Elachi said, drawing parallels with Leonardo da Vinciâs 500 year old drawings with the final Curiosity design. âWhat could we imagine for our future? Combine imagination with determination and you can achieve.â Across the Atlantic, one of Europeâs biggest scientific success stories, the CERN laboratory on the FrancoâSwiss border, it is not only scientists working to fulfill CERNâs mission âTo push back the frontiers of knowledgeâ. Launched in 2011, the artistsâ residency program âCollide@CERNâ is inspired by Albert Einstein: âKnowledge is limited, imagination encircles the world.â Board Weekend speaker, Ariane Koek, founder of the Collide@CERN Artistsâ Residency Program, described her initiative as an âImagination Laboratoryâ focusing research, discovery, experimentation and play, by pairing artists with scientists (also known as a âscientific inspiration partnerâ) to âcollide withâ and inspire both their work. Rather than seek to divide art from science or simply relegate the art to better explaining the science, Koekâs program seeks to elevate the two spheres to equal standing â best encapsulated in the work da Vinci, who was equally renowned for his talents as a scientist and an artist â and ultimately seek to answer the question: âWhere does creativity come from?â In working to fulfill its mission, CERN has taken a collaborative approach, where nationality (and its related conflicts) prove to be little boundary. With over 2000 staff from 680 institutions and 100 countries, CERN was the perfect place to explore how imagination happens, explained Koek. This multinational, collaborative approach is as present in the 2013 vision of Salzburg Global Seminar as it was in 1947.
Sustainability Given the vast environmental and economic challenges the world faces, this imaginative thinking must be coupled with sustainable and universally just solutions. But sustainability must not be a separate, stand alone discipline, argued speaker on the second panel âSustatinability,â Jan-Ernst de Groot, Managing Director for External Affairs and General Counsel at TNT Express. Instead, sustainability should become a normal and integrated part of day-to-day business and governance, argued the businessman. Business and government have more than just an altruistic concern in acting sustainably: a sustainable future will be a more prosperous future, and if their respective consumers and citizens are prosperous and happy they are more likely to buy and less likely to protest. To âmainstreamâ sustainable thinking in business, a triangle of change is needed, de Groot said, combining efforts made by consumers, producers and regulators. Some consumers are willing to change their own purchasing habits to be more sustainable, but most believe the onus of change belongs with the producers, however many producers are loathe to incur greater costs â thatâs where regulation could come in, but in turn the regulators would likely only act if there was sufficient consumer pressure. Companies cannot operate if they do not meet certain safety regulations. âWhy not the same for sustainability?â asked de Groot. Fresh from the session âA Climate for Change: New Thinking on Governance for Sustainabilityâ held earlier in the week, senior researcher on water diplomacy at the Hague Institute for Global Justice and Salzburg Global adjunct program director Georgios Kostakos, asked the audience to consider how our democratic systems could be encouraged to think more long-term, instead of in two to five year election cycles. Ultimately, he asked, what is really most important: planet, people or profit? Echoing Elachiâs comments from earlier in the morning, Kostakos darkly joked: âMars might be the future of humanity.â Not as some alternative host planet as seen in countless science fiction movies, but if we do not act, Earth might become as dry, desolate and uninhabitable as the Red Planet. But as Kostakos pointed out: âWe cannot tell the developing world you cannot pollute - we've been doing that here for 200 years!â Thus, our imaginative, sustainable solutions to the worldâs problems much also be fair and just to all â the third cluster of Salzburg Globalâs program thinking.
Justice Speaking on the final panel of the day, under the heading âJusticeâ, Jim Bacchus, chair of the World Economic Forumâs Global Agenda Council on Governance and Sustainability and Liz Thompson, the UNâs former Assistant Secretary General and Executive Coordinator, Rio+20, grappled with the concept of a united Earth. Bacchus, a former US Senator from Florida â home to NASAâs Kennedy Space Station at Cape Canaveral â suggested the audience see the world as the astronauts from space do: without the man-made lines of national boundaries, and urged them to âWiden the circle of your personal concern.â We cannot change human nature, he admitted. Instead, we should realize we share a common nature and should thus "appeal to the better angels of our nature". âOur concerns should not be just of our nearest and dearest,â he argued, âbut also of those on the far side of the world.â None of us are free unless we are all free, said Bacchus, and, speaking as both a former politician and lawyer, democracy and the rule of law are crucial to realizing that freedom. Democracy may not be working how it should â but the answer is not to turn away from democracy, but to make it work better. Freedom, he argued, is only possible within the framework of the rule of law. âEverything else is chaos.â After leading the audience in an impromptu rendition of John Lennonâs song Imagine, fellow former politician and lawyer, Thompson asked the audience to consider their own social constructs of how they see the world â and what prevents them from seeing the world being âas oneâ, as Lennon had sang? âHow do we see others? And how does that affect our expectations of them? How can we remove these barriers so we all have dignity?â asked the former Minister for Energy and Environment, Barbados, herself repeatedly subjected to misconceptions. Despite being a highly educated with four degrees and high-level jobs within both her own country and the UN, Thompson still feels she is often dismissed for being a black woman. Regardless of wealth or poverty, we all connected by the Earth we live in and we need to work for a shared future, she argued. But to be able to do that, we need to readdress what we want that future to be and what we need in that future. The eastern seaboard of the USA was âbrought to its kneesâ by the category three storm Hurricane Sandy â but much worse disasters have affected other areas of the world, which have had less means to recover. What would have happened to the US if a bigger storm had hit it, as might well do with the increasingly extreme weather? âPoverty is a man-made construct and man can end it,â said Thompson. âWe have enough money for every manâs need, but not every man's greed!â Margaret Mead, renowned anthropologist and faculty member of the first ever Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, once said: âNever doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.â More than 65 years on, this still inspires the mission of Salzburg Global Seminar. Concluding the weekendâs panels, Thompson brought Meadâs thinking to an even smaller level: âThe changing of the world can only start if we only start with ourselves.â John Lennon sang: âYou may say Iâm a dreamer, but I am not the only one.â As all the weekendâs speakers highlighted, changing the world will take a collaborative, multi-disciplinary, multi-level, cross-sector and cross-boundary approach; by tackling global issues through an inter-disciplinary and inter-locking manner, Salzburg Global aims to stimulate fresh thinking and practical steps to support those who make change happen, with imagination, sustainability and justice at the forefront.
You can read more about the Salzburg Global Vision in our publication attached below: Imagination, Sustainability and Justice: The Power of Partnership.
You can hear all the weekend's speakers on our SoundCloud stream: